.ft 210 
113 
opy 1 




#l& &ourf> Heaflct^ 



No. 109. 



The Ground of 

the Free 
School System. 

By HORACE MANN. 



From his Tenth Annual Report as Secretary of the Massa- 
chusetts State Board of Education, 1846. 



The Pilgrim Fathers amid all their privations and dangers 
conceived the magnificent idea, not only of a universal, but of 
a free education for the whole people. To find the time and 
the means to reduce this grand conception to practice, they 
stinted themselves, amid all their poverty, to a still scantier 
pittance ; amid all their toils, they imposed upon themselves 
still more burdensome labors ; and, amid all their perils, they 
braved still greater dangers. Two divine ideas filled their 
great hearts, — their duty to God and to posterity. For the 
one they built the church, for the other they opened the school. 
Religion and knowledge, — two attributes of the same glorious 
and eternal truth, and that truth the only one on which immor- 
tal or mortal happiness can be securely founded ! 

It is impossible for us adequately to conceive the boldness of 
the measure which aimed at universal education through the 
establishment of free schools. As a fact, it had no precedent 
in the world's history ; and, as a theory, it could have been 
refuted and silenced by a more formidable array of argument 
and experience than was ever marshalled against any other in- 
stitution of human origin. But time has ratified its soundness. 
Two centuries of successful operation now proclaim it to be as 
wise as it was courageous, and as beneficent as it was disinter- 
ested. Every community in the civilized -world awards it the 
meed of praise ; and states at home and nations abroad, in the 

i77 



order of their intelligence, are copying the bright example. 
What we call the enlightened nations of Christendom are ap- 
proaching, by slow degrees, to the moral elevation which our 
ancestors reached at a single bound. ... 

The alleged ground upon which the founders of our free- 
school system proceeded when adopting it did not embrace 
the whole argument by which it may be defended and sus- 
tained. Their insight was better than their reason. They 
assumed a ground, indeed, satisfactory and convincing to Prot- 
estants ; but at that time only a small portion of Christendom 
was Protestant, and even now only a minority of it is so. 
The very ground on which our free schools were founded, 
therefore, if it were the only one, would have been a reason 
with more than half of Christendom for their immediate abo- 
lition. 

In later times, and since the achievement of American inde- 
pendence, the universal and ever-repeated argument in favor of 
free schools has been that the general intelligence which they 
are capable of diffusing, and which can be imparted by no 
other human instrumentality, is indispensable to the continu- 
ance of a republican government. This argument, it is obvi- 
ous, assumes, as a postulatum, the superiority of a republican 
over all other forms of government ; and, as a people, we re- 
ligiously believe in the soundness both of the assumption and 
of the argument founded upon it. But, if this be all, then a 
sincere monarchist, or a defender of arbitrary power, or a be- 
liever in the divine right of kings, would oppose free schools 
for the identical reasons we offer in \heir behalf. . . . 

Again, the expediency of free schools is sometimes advo- 
cated on grounds of political economy. An educated people is 
always a more industrious and productive people. Intelligence 
is a primary ingredient in the wealth of nations. . . . The moral- 
ist, too, takes up the argument of the economist. He demon- 
strates that vice and crime are not only prodigals and spend- 
thrifts of their own, but defrauders and plunderers of the means 
of others, that they would seize upon all the gains of honest 
industry and exhaust the bounties of Heaven itself without sa- 
tiating their rapacity ; and that often in the history of the world 
whole generations might have been trained to industry and virtue 
by the wealth which one enemy to his race has destroyed. 

And yet, notwithstanding these views have been presented a 
thousand times with irrefutable logic, and with a divine elo- 
178 • 



quence of truth which it would seem that nothing but combined 
stolidity and depravity could resist, there is not at the present 
time, [1846] with the exception of the States of New England 
and a few small communities elsewhere, a country or a state in 
Christendom which maintains a system of free schools for the 
education of its children. ... 

I believe that this amazing dereliction from duty, especially 
in our own country, originates more in the false notions which 
men entertain respecting the nature of their right to property than 
in any thing else. In the district school meeting, in the town 
meeting, in legislative halls, everywhere, the advocates for a 
more generous education could carry their respective audiences 
with them in behalf of increased privileges for our children, 
were it not instinctively foreseen that increased privileges must 
be followed by increased taxation. Against this obstacle, argu- 
ment falls dead. The rich man who has no children declares 
that the exaction of a contribution from him to educate the 
children of his neighbor is an invasion of his rights of property. 
The man who has reared and educated a family of children 
denounces it as a double tax when he is called upon to assist 
in educating the children of others also ; or, if he has reared 
his own children without educating them, he thinks it pecul- 
iarly oppressive to be obliged to do for others what he re- 
frained from doing even for himself. Another, having children, 
but disdaining to educate them with the common mass, with- 
draws them from the public school, puts them under what he 
calls " selecter influences," and then thinks it a grievance to be 
obliged to support a school which he contemns. Or, if these 
different parties so far yield to the force of traditionary senti- 
ment and usage, and to the public opinion around them, as to 
consent to do something for the cause, they soon reach the limit 
of expense at which their admitted obligation or their alleged 
charity terminates. 

It seems not irrelevant, therefore, in this connection, and for 
the purpose of strengthening the foundation on which our free- 
school system reposes, to inquire into the nature of a man's 
right to the property he possesses, and to satisfy ourselves re- 
specting the question whether any man has such an indefeasi- 
ble title to his estates or such an absolute ownership of them 
as renders it unjust in the government to assess upon him his 
share of the expenses of educating the children of the commu- 
nity .up to such a point as the nature of the institutions under 
which he lives, and the well-being of society, require. 

i79 



I believe in the existence of a great, immortal, immutable 
principle of natural law, or natural ethics, — a principle ante- 
cedent to all human institutions, and incapable of being abro- 
gated by any ordinance of man, — a principle of divine origin, 
clearly legible in the ways of Providence as those ways are 
manifested in the order of nature and in the history of the race, 
which proves the absolute right to an education of every human 
being that comes into the world, and which, of course, proves 
the correlative duty of every government to see that the means 
of that education are provided for all. 

In regard to the application of this principle of natural law, 
— that is, in regard to the extent of the education to be pro- 
vided for all at the public expense, — some differences of opinion 
may fairly exist under different political organizations ; but, 
under our republican government, it seems clear that the mini- 
mum of this education can never be less than such as is suffi- 
cient to qualify each citizen for the civil and social duties he 
will be called to discharge, — such an education as teaches the 
individual the great laws of bodily health, as qualifies for the 
fulfilment of parental duties, as is indispensable for the civil 
functions of a witness or a juror, as is necessary for the voter 
in municipal and in national affairs, and, finally, as is requisite 
for the faithful and conscientious discharge of all those duties 
which devolve upon the inheritor of a portion of the sovereignty 
of this great republic. ... So far is it from being a wrong or a 
hardship to demand of the possessors of property their respec- 
tive shares for the prosecution of this divinely ordained work, 
that they themselves are guilty of the most far-reaching in- 
justice when they seek to resist or to evade the contribution. 
The complainers are the wrong-doers. The cry, " Stop thief ! " 
comes from the thief himself. 

To any one who looks beyond the mere surface of things, it 
is obvious that the primary and natural elements or ingredients 
of all property consist in the riches of the soil, in the treasures 
of the sea, in the light and warmth of the sun, in the fertilizing 
clouds and streams and dews, in the winds, and in the chemi- 
cal and vegetative agencies of Nature. In the majority of cases, 
all that we call property, all that makes up the valuation or 
inventory of a nation's capital, was prepared at the creation, 
and was laid up of old in the capacious storehouses of Nature. 
For every unit that a man earns by his own toil or skill, he 
receives hundreds and thousands, without cost and without 
180 



recompense, from the all-bountiful Giver. A proud mortal, 
standing in the midst of his luxuriant wheat-fields or cotton- 
plantations, may arrogantly call them his own ; yet what bar- 
ren wastes would they be, did not Heaven send down upon 
them its dews and its rains, its warmth and its light, and sus- 
tain, for their growth and ripening, the grateful vicissitude of 
the seasons ! It is said that from eighty to ninety per cent, of 
the very substance of some of the great staples of agriculture 
are not taken from the earth, but are absorbed from the air ; so 
that these productions may more properly be called fruits of 
the atmosphere than of the soil. Who prepares this elemental 
wealth ? Who scatters it, like a sower, through all the regions 
of the atmosphere, and sends the richly freighted winds, as His 
messengers, to bear to each leaf in the forest, and to each blade 
in the cultivated field, the nourishment which their infinitely 
varied needs demand ? Aided by machinery, a single manufact- 
urer performs the labor of hundreds of men. Yet what could 
he accomplish without the weight of the waters which God 
causes ceaselessly to flow, or without those gigantic forces 
which he has given to steam ? And how would the commerce 
of the world be carried on, were it not for those great laws of 
Nature — of electricity, of condensation, and of rarefaction — 
that give birth to the winds, which, in conformity to the will of 
Heaven and not in obedience to any power of man, forever 
traverse the earth, and offer themselves as an unchartered me- 
dium for interchanging the products of all the zones ? These 
few references show how vast a proportion of all the wealth 
which men presumptuously call their own, because they claim 
to have earned it, is poured into their lap, unasked and un- 
thanked for, by the Being so infinitely gracious in his physical 
as well as in his moral bestowments. 

But for whose subsistence and benefit were these exhaustless 
treasuries of wealth created ? Surely not for any one man, 
nor for any one generation, but for the subsistence and benefit 
of the whole race from the beginning to the end of time. 
They were not created for Adam alone, nor for Noah alone, 
nor for the first discoverers or colonists who may have found 
or have peopled any part of the earth's ample domain. Xo. 
They were created for the race collectively, but to be possessed 
and enjoyed in succession as the generations, one after another, 
should come into existence, — equal righ'ts, with a successive 
enjoyment of them. If we consider the earth and the fulness 

181 



thereof as one great habitation or domain, then each generation, 
subject to certain modifications for the encouragement of indus- 
try and frugality, — which modifications it is not necessary here 
to specify, — has only a life-lease in them. There are certain 
reasonable regulations, indeed, in regard to the outgoing and 
the incoming tenants, — regulations which allow to the out- 
going generations a brief control over their property after they 
are called upon to leave it, and which also allow the incoming 
generations to anticipate a little their full right of possession. 
But, subject to these regulations, nature ordains a perpetual 
entail and transfer from one generation to another of all prop- 
erty in the great, substantive, enduring elements of wealth, — 
in the soil, in metals and minerals, in precious stones, and in 
more precious coal and iron and granite, in the waters and 
winds and sun ; and no one man, nor any one generation of 
men, has any such title to or ownership in these ingredients 
and substantial of all wealth that his right is evaded when a 
portion of them is taken for the benefit of posterity. 

This great principle of natural law may be illustrated by a 
reference to some of the unstable elements, in regard to which 
each individual's right of property is strongly qualified in rela- 
tion to his contemporaries, even while he has the acknowledged 
right of possession. Take the streams of water or the wind, 
for an example. A stream, as it descends from its sources to its 
mouth, is successively the property of all those through whose 
land it passes. My neighbor who lives above me owned it 
yesterday, while it was passing through his lands: I own it 
to-day, while it is descending through mine ; and the contigu- 
ous proprietor below will own it to-morrow, while it is flowing 
through his, as it passes onward to the next. But the rights 
of these successive owners are not absolute and unqualified. 
They are limited by the rights of those who are entitled to the 
subsequent possession and use. While a stream is passing 
through my lands, I may not corrupt it, so that it' shall be 
offensive or valueless to the adjoining proprietor below. I may 
not stop it in its downward course, nor divert it into any other 
direction, so that it shall leave this channel dry. I may law- 
fully use it for various purposes — for agriculture, as in irrigat- 
ing lands or watering cattle ; for manufactures, as in turning 
wheels, etc.; — but, in all my uses of it,. I must pay regard to 
the rights of my neighbors lower down. So no two proprietors, 
nor any half-dozen proprietors, by conspiring together, can de- 
182 



prive an owner, who lives below them all, of the ultimate right 
which he has to the use of the stream in its descending course. 
We see here, therefore, that a man has certain qualified rights 
— rights of which he cannot lawfully be divested without his 
own consent — in a stream of water before it reaches the 
limits of his own estate, at which latter point he may some- 
what more emphatically call it his own. And, in this sense, 
a man who lives at the outlet of a river, on the margin of the 
ocean, has certain incipient rights in those fountain-sources that 
well up from the earth at the distance of thousands of miles. . . . 

In one respect, the winds illustrate our relative rights and 
duties even better than the streams. In the latter case the 
rights are not only successive, but always in the same order 
of priority, those of the owner above necessarily preceding 
those of the owner below. ... In the case of the winds, however, 
which blow- from every quarter of the heavens, I may have the 
prior right to-day ; but, with a change in their direction, my 
neighbor may have it to-morrow. If, therefore, to-day, when 
the wind is going from me to him, I should usurp the right to 
use it to his detriment, to-morrow, when it is coming from him 
to me, he may inflict retributive usurpation upon me. 

The light of the sun, too, is subject to the same benign and 
equitable regulations. As the waves of this ethereal element 
pass by me, I have a right to bask in their genial warmth or to 
employ their quickening powers ; but I have no right, even on 
my own land, to build up a wall mountain-high that shall eclipse 
the sun to my neighbor's eyes. 

Now all these great principles of natural law which define 
and limit the rights of neighbors and contemporaries are incor- 
porated into and constitute a part of the civil law of every 
civilized people ; and they are obvious and simple illustrations 
of the great proprietary laws by which individuals and genera- 
tions hold their rights in the solid substance of the globe, in 
the elements that move over its surface, and in the chemical 
and vital powers with which it is so marvellously endued. As 
successive owners on a river's bank have equal rights to the 
waters that flow through their respective domains, subject only 
to the modification that the proprietors nearer the stream's 
source must have precedence in the enjoyment of their rights 
over those lower down, so the rights of all the generations of 
mankind to the earth itself, to the streams that fertilize it, to 
the winds that purify it, to the vital principles that animate it, 

183 



8 

and to the reviving light, are common rights, though subject to 
similar modifications in regard to the preceding and succeeding 
generations of men. . . . 

Is not the inference irresistible, then, that no man, by what- 
ever means he may have come into possession of his property, 
has any natural right, any more than he has^ a moral one, to 
hold it, or to dispose of it, irrespective of the needs and claims 
of those who, in the august processions of the generations, are 
to be his successors on the stage of existence ? Holding his 
rights subject to their rights, he is bound not to impair the 
value of their inheritance either by commission or by omission. 

Generation after generation proceeds from the creative 
energy of God. Each one stops for a brief period upon the 
earth, resting, as it were, only for a night, like migratory birds 
upon their passage, and then leaving it forever to others whose 
existence is as transitory as its own ; and the migratory flocks 
of water-fowl which sweep across our latitudes in their passage 
to another clime have as good a right to make a perpetual 
appropriation to their own use of the lands over which they 
fly as any one generation has to arrogate perpetual dominion 
and sovereignty, for its own purposes, over that portion of the 
earth which it is its fortune to occupy during the brief period 
of its temporal existence. 

Another consideration bearing upon this arrogant doctrine 
of absolute ownership or sovereignty has hardly less force 
than the one just expounded. We have seen how insignificant 
a portion of any man's possessions he can claim in any proper 
and just sense to have earned, and that, in regard to all the 
residue, he is only taking his turn in the use of a bounty be- 
stowed in common, by the Giver of all, upon his ancestors, 
upon himself, and upon his posterity, — a line of indefinite 
length, in which he is but a point. But this is not the only 
deduction to be made from his assumed rights. The present 
wealth of the world has an additional element in it. Much of 
all that is capable of being earned by man has been earned by 
our predecessors, and has come down to us in a solid and en-, 
during form. We have not erected all the houses in which 
we live, nor constructed all the roads on which we travel, 
nor built all the ships in which we carry on our commerce 
with the world. We have not reclaimed from the wilderness 
all the fields whose harvests we now reap ; and, if we had no 
precious metals or stones or pearls but such as we ourselves 
184 



had dug from the mines or brought up from the bottom of the 
ocean, our coffers and our caskets would be empty indeed. 
But, even if this were not so, whence came all the arts and sci- 
ences, the discoveries and the inventions, without which, and 
without a common right to which, the valuation of the prop- 
erty of a whole nation would scarcely equal the inventory of 
a single man, — without which, indeed, we should now be in a 
state of barbarism ? Whence came a knowledge of agriculture, 
without which we should have so little to reap ? or a knowl- 
edge of astronomy, without which we could not traverse the 
oceans ? or a knowledge of chemistry and mechanical philoso- 
phy, without which the arts and trades could not exist ? Most 
of all this was found out by those who have gone before us ; 
and some of it has come down to us from a remote antiquity. 
Surely, all these boons and blessings belong as much to poster- 
ity as to ourselves. They have not descended to us to be ar- 
rested and consumed here or to be sequestrated from the ages 
to come. Cato and Archimedes, and Kepler and Newton, and 
Franklin and Arkwright and Fulton, and all the bright host 
of benefactors to science and art, did not make or bequeath 
their discoveries or inventions to benefit any one generation, 
but to increase the common enjoyments of mankind to the end 
of time. So of all the great lawgivers and moralists who have 
improved the civil institutions of the state, who have made it 
dangerous to be wicked, or, far better than this, have made it 
hateful to be so. Resources developed and property acquired 
after all these ages of preparation, after all these facilities and 
securities, accrue, not to the benefit of the possessor only, but to 
that of the next and of all succeeding generations. 

Surely, these considerations limit still more extensively that 
absoluteness of ownership which is so often claimed by the 
possessors of wealth. 

But sometimes the rich farmer, the opulent manufacturer, or 
the capitalist, when sorely pressed with his natural and moral 
obligation to contribute a portion of his means for the educa- 
tion of the young, replies, — either in form or in spirit, — "My 
lands, my machinery, my gold, and my silver are mine : may 
I not do what I will with my own ? " There is one supposa- 
ble case, and only one, where this argument would have plausi- 
bility. If it were made by an isolated, solitary being, — a 
being having no relations to a community around him, having 
no ancestors to whom he had been indebted for ninety-nine 

185 



10 

parts in every hundred of all he possesses, and expecting to 
leave no posterity after him, — it might not be easy to answer 
it. If there were but one family in this Western hemisphere 
and only one in the Eastern hemisphere, and these two families 
bore no civil and social relations to each other, and were to be 
the first and last of the whole race, it might be difficult, except 
on very high and almost transcendental grounds, for either one 
of them to show good cause why the other should contribute 
to help educate children not his own. And perhaps the force 
of the appeal for such an object would be still further dimin- 
ished if the nearest neighbor of a single family upon our planet 
were as far from the earth as Uranus or Sirius. In self-defence 
or in selfishness one might say to the other : " What are your 
fortunes to me ? You can neither benefit nor molest me. Let 
each of us keep to his own side of the planetary spaces." But 
is this the relation which any man amongst us sustains to his 
fellows ? In the midst of a populous community to which he 
is bound by innumerable ties, having had his own fortune and 
condition almost predetermined and foreordained by his prede- 
cessors, and being about to exert upon his successors as com- 
manding an influence as has been exerted upon himself, the 
objector can no longer shrink into his individuality, and dis- 
claim connection and relationship with the world at large. He 
cannot deny that there are thousands around him on whom he 
acts, and who are continually reacting upon him. The earth 
is much too small or the race is v far too numerous to allow us 
to be hermits, and therefore we cannot adopt either the phi- 
losophy or the morals of hermits. All have derived benefits 
from their ancestors ; and all are bound, as by an oath, to trans- 
mit those benefits, even in an improved condition, to posterity. 
We may as well attempt to escape from our own personal iden- 
tity as to shake off the threefold relation which we bear to 
others, — the relation of an associate with our contemporaries, 
of a beneficiary of our ancestors, of a guardian to those who, 
in the sublime order of Providence, are to succeed us. Out of 
these relations, manifest duties are evolved. The society of 
which we necessarily constitute a part must be preserved ; and, 
in order to preserve it, we must not look merely to what one 
individual or one family needs, but to what the whole commu- 
nity needs, not merely to what one generation needs, but to 
the wants of a succession of generations. To draw conclusions 
without considering these facts is to leave out the most impor- 
tant part of the premises. 
1 86 



II 

A powerfully corroborating fact remains untouched. Though 
the earth and the beneficent capabilities with which it is endued 
belong in common to the race, yet we find that previous and 
present possessors have laid their hands upon the whole of it, — 
have left no part of it unclaimed and unappropriated. They 
have circumnavigated the globe; they* have drawn lines across 
every habitable portion of it, and have partitioned amongst 
themselves not only its whole area or superficial contents, but 
have claimed it down to the centre and up to the concave, — 
a great inverted pyramid for each proprietor, — so that not an 
unclaimed rood is left, either in the caverns below or in the 
aerial spaces above, where a new 7 adventurer upon existence can 
take unresisted possession. They have entered into a solemn 
compact with each other for the mutual defence of their respec- 
tive allotments. They have created legislators and judges and 
executive officers, who denounce and inflict penalties even to 
the taking of life ; and they have organized armed bands to 
repel aggression upon their claims. Indeed, so grasping and 
rapacious have mankind been in this particular, that they have 
taken more than they could use, more than they could perambu- 
late and survey, more than they could see from the top of the 
masthead or from the highest peak of the mountain. There 
was some limit to their physical power of taking possession, 
but none to the exorbitancy of their desires. Like robbers, who 
divide their spoils before they know whether they shall find a 
victim, men have claimed a continent while still doubtful of its 
existence, and spread out their title from ocean to ocean before 
their most adventurous pioneers had ever seen a shore of the 
realms they coveted. The whole planet, then, having been ap- 
propriated, — there being no waste or open lands from which 
the new generations may be supplied as they come into exist- 
ence, — have not those generations the strongest conceivable 
claim upon the present occupants for that which is indispensable 
to their well-being ? They have more than a pre-emptive, they 
have a possessory right to some portion of the issues and profits 
of that general domain, all of w 7 hich has been thus taken up 
and appropriated. A denial of this right by the present pos- 
sessors is a breach of trust, a fraudulent misuse of power 
given and of confidence implied. On mere principles of politi- 
cal economy, it is folly ; on the broader principles of duty and 
morality, it is embezzlement. 

It is not at all in contravention of this view of the subject 

187 



12 

that the adult portion of society does take, and must take, upon 
itself the control and management of all existing property 
until the rising generation has arrived at the age of majority. 
Nay, one of the objects of their so doing is to preserve the 
rights of the generation which is still in its minority. Society, 
to this extent, is only a trustee managing an estate for the 
benefit of a part owner or of one who has a reversionary inter- 
est in it. This civil regulation, therefore, made necessary even 
for the benefit of both present and future possessors, is only in 
furtherance of the great law under consideration. 

Coincident, too, with this great law, but in no manner super- 
seding or invalidating it, is that wonderful provision which the 
Creator has made for the care of offspring in the affection of 
their parents. Heaven did not rely merely upon our percep- 
tions of duty toward our children and our fidelity in its per- 
formance. A powerful, all-mastering instinct of love was 
therefore implanted in the parental and especially in the ma- 
ternal breast, to anticipate the idea of duty and to make duty 
delightful. Yet the great doctrine founded upon the will of 
God as made known to us in the natural order and relation of 
things would still remain the same, though all this beautiful 
portion of our moral being, whence parental affection springs, 
were a void and a nonenity. Emphatically would the obli- 
gations of society remain the same for all those children who 
have been bereaved of parents, or who, worse than bereave- 
ment, have only monster parents bf intemperance or cupidity, 
or of any other of those forms of vice that seem to suspend or 
to obliterate the law of love in the parental breast. For these 
society is doubly bound to be a parent, and to exercise all that 
rational care and providence which a wise father would exer- 
cise for his own children. 

- If the previous argument began with sound premises, and 
has been logically conducted, then it has established this posi- 
tion, — that a vast portion of the present wealth of the world 
either consists in, or has been immediately derived from, those 
great natural substances and powers of the earth which were 
bestowed by the Creator alike on all mankind ; or from the 
discoveries, inventions, labors, and improvements of our ances- 
tors, which were alike designed for the common benefit of all 
their descendants. The question now arises, At what time is 
this wealth to be transferred from a preceding to a succeeding 
generation ? At what point are the latter to take possession of 



13 

it or to derive benefit from it ? or at what time are the former 
to surrender it in their behalf ? Is -each existing generation, 
and each individual of an existing generation, to hold fast to 
his possessions until death relaxes his grasp? or is something 
of the right to be acknowledged, and something of the benefit 
to be yielded, beforehand ? It seems too obvious for argument 
that the latter is the only alternative. If the incoming genera- 
tion have no rights until the outgoing generation have actu- 
ally retired, then is every individual that enters the world liable 
to perish on the day he is born. According to the very consti- 
tution of things, each individual must obtain sustenance and 
succor as soon as his eyes open in quest of light or his lungs 
gasp for the first breath of air. His wants cannot be delayed 
until he himself can supply them. If the demands of his 
nature are ever to be answered, they must be answered years 
before he can make any personal provision for them, either by 
the performance of any labor or by any exploits of skill. The 
infant must be fed before he can earn his bread, he must be 
clothed before he can prepare garments, he must be protected 
from the elements before he can erect a dwelling ; and it is 
just as clear that he must be instructed before he can engage 
or reward a tutor. A course contrary to this would be the 
destruction of the young, that we might rob them of their 
rightful inheritance. Carried to its extreme, it would be the 
act of Herod, seeking in a general massacre the life of one 
who was supposed to endanger his power. Here, then, the 
claims of the succeeding generation, not only upon the affec- 
tion and the care, but upon the property, of the preceding one, 
attach. God having given to the second generation as full and 
complete a right to the incomes and profits of the world as he 
has given to the first, and to the third generation as full and 
complete a right as he has given to the second, and so on while 
the world stands, it necessarily follows that children must 
come into a partial and qualified possession of these rights by 
the paramount law of nature, as soon as they are born. No 
human enactment can abolish or countervail this paramount 
and supreme law ; and all those positive and often arbitrary 
enactments of the civil code, by which, for the encouragement 
of industry and frugality, the possessor of property is permitted 
to control it for a limited period after his decease, must be con- 
strued and executed in subservience to this sovereign and 
irrepealable ordinance of nature. 

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14 

Nor is this transfer always, or even generally, to be made in 
kind, but according to the needs of the recipient. The recog- 
nition of this principle is universal. A guardian or trustee 
may possess lands while the ward or owner under the trust 
may need money, or the former may have money while the 
latter need raiment or shelter. The form of the estate must be 
changed, if need be, and adapted to the wants of the receiver. 

The claim of a child, then, to a portion of pre-existent prop- 
erty, begins with the first breath he draws. The new-born in- 
fant must have sustenance and shelter and care. If the natu- 
ral parents are removed or parental ability fails, in a word, if 
parents either cannot or will not supply the infant's wants, — 
then society at large — the government having assumed to it- 
self the ultimate control of all property — is bound to step in 
and fill the parent's place. To deny this to any child would 
be equivalent to a sentence of death, a capital execution of 
the innocent, — at which every soul .shudders. It would be a 
more cruel form of infanticide than any which is practised in 
China or in Africa. 

But to preserve the animal life of a child only, and there to 
stop, would be, not the bestowment of a blessing or the per- 
formance of a duty, but the infliction of a fearful curse. A 
child has interests far higher than those of mere physical exist- 
ence. Better that the wants of the natural life should be dis- 
regarded than that the higher interests of the character should 
be neglected. If a child has any claim to bread to keep him 
from perishing, he has a far higher claim to knowledge to pre- 
serve him from error and its fearful retinue of calamities. If a 
child has any claim to shelter to protect him from the destroy- 
ing elements, he has a far higher claim to be rescued from the 
infamy and perdition of vice and crime. 

All moralists agree, nay, all moralists maintain, that a man 
is as responsible for his omissions as for his commissions ; that 
he is as guilty of the wrong which he could have prevented, 
but did not, as for that which his own hand has perpetrated. 
They, then, who knowingly withhold sustenance from a new- 
born child, and he dies, are guilty of infanticide. And, by the 
same reasoning, they who refuse to enlighten the intellect of 
the rising generation are guilty of degrading the human race. 
They who refuse to train up children in the way they should 
go are training up incendiaries and madmen to destroy prop- 
erty and life, and to invade and pollute the sanctuaries of soci- 
190 



is 

ety. In a word, if the mind is as real and substantive a part 
of human existence as the body, then mental attributes, during 
the periods of infancy and childhood, demand provision at least 
as imperatively as bodily appetites. The time when these re- 
spective obligations attach corresponds with the periods when 
the nurture, whether physical or mental, is needed. As the 
right of sustenance is of equal date with birth, so the right of 
intellectual and moral training begins at least as early as when 
children are ordinarily sent to school. At that time, then, by 
the irrepealable law of Nature, every child succeeds to so much 
more of the property of the community as is necessary for his 
education. He is to receive this, not in the form of lands, or 
of gold and silver, but in the form of knowledge and a training 
to good habits. This is one of the steps in the transfer of 
property from a present to a succeeding generation. Human 
sagacity may be at fault in fixing the amount of property to 
be transferred or the time when the transfer should be made 
to a dollar or to an hour ; but certainly, in a republican gov- 
ernment, the obligation of the predecessors, and the right of 
the successors, extend to and embrace the means of such an 
amount of education as will prepare each individual to perform 
all the duties which devolve upon him as a man and a citizen. 
It may go farther than this point : certainly, it cannot fall short 
of it. 

Under our political organization the places and the proc- 
esses where this transfer is to be provided for, and its amount 
determined, are the district-school meeting, the town-meeting, 
legislative halls, and conventions for establishing or revising 
the fundamental laws of the State. If it be not done there, so- 
ciety is false to its high trusts ; and any community, whether 
national or state, that ventures to organize a government, or to 
administer a government already organized, without making 
provision for the free education of all its children, dares the 
certain vengeance of Heaven ; and in the squalid forms of 
poverty and destitution, in the scourges of violence and mis- 
rule, in the heart-destroying corruptions of licentiousness and 
debauchery, and in political profligacy and legalized perfidy, 
in all the blended and mutually aggravated crimes of civiliza- 
tion and barbarism, will be sure to feel the terrible retribu- 
tions of its delinquency. 

I bring my argument on this point, then, to a close ; and I 
present a test of its validity, which, as it seems to me, defies 
denial or evasion. 

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i6 

In obedience to the laws of God and to the laws of all civi- 
lized communities, society is bound to protect the natural life 
of children ; and this natural life cannot be protected without 
the appropriation and use of a portion of the property which 
society possesses. We prohibit infanticide under penalty of 
death. We practise a refinement in this particular. The life 
of an infant is inviolable, even before he is born ; and he who 
feloniously takes it, even before birth, is as subject to the ex- 
treme, penalty of the law as though he had struck down man- 
hood in its vigor, or taken away a mother by violence from 
the sanctuary of home where she blesses her offspring. But 
why preserve the natural life of a child, why preserve unborn 
embryos of life, if we do not intend to watch over and to pro- 
tect them, and to expand their subsequent existence into use- 
fulness and happiness ? As individuals, or as an organized 
community, we have no natural right, we can derive no au- 
thority or countenance from reason, we can cite no attribute 
or purpose of the divine nature, for giving birth to any human 
being, and then inflicting upon that being the curse of igno- 
rance, of poverty, and of vice, with all their attendant calami- 
ties. We are brought, then, to this startling but inevitable 
alternative, — the natural life of an infant should be extin- 
guished as soon as it is born, or the means should be provided 
to save that life from being a curse to its possessor ; and, there- 
fore, every State is morally bound to enact a code of laws 
legalizing and enforcing infanticide or a code of laws estab- 
lishing free schools. 

The three following propositions, then, describe the broad 
and ever-during foundation on which the common-school sys- 
tem of Massachusetts reposes : — 

The successive generations of men, taken collectively, con- 
stitute one great commonwealth. 

The property of this commonwealth is pledged for the edu- 
cation of all its youth, up to such a point as will save them 
from poverty and vice, and prepare them for the adequate 
performance of their social and civil duties. 

The successive holders of this property are trustees, bound 
to the faithful execution of their trust by the most sacred obli- 
gations ; and embezzlement and pillage from children and 
descendants have not less of criminality, and have more of 
meanness, than the same offences when perpetrated against 
contemporaries. 
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I? 

Recognizing these eternal principles of natural ethics, the 
Constitution of Massachusetts, the fundamental law of the 
State, after declaring (among other things) in the preamble 
to the first section of the fifth chapter that " the encourage- 
ment of arts and sciences and all good literature tends to the 
honor of God, the advantage of the Christian religion, and 
the great benefit of this and the other United States of Amer- 
ica," proceeds, in the second section of the same chapter, to set 
forth the duties of all future legislators and magistrates in the 
following noble and impressive language : — 

"Wisdom and knowledge, as w T ell as virtue, diffused gener- 
ally among the body of the people, being necessary for the 
preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend 
on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in 
the various parts of the country and among the different orders 
of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magis- 
trates in all future periods of this Commonwealth to cherish 
the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries 
of them, especially the university of Cambridge, public schools 
and grammar schools in the towns ; to encourage private so- 
cieties and public institutions, rewards, and immunities for the 
promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trade, man- 
ufactures, and a natural history of the country ; to counte- 
nance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general 
benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, 
honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good 
humor, and all social affections and generous sentiments 
among the people." See also Rev. Stat., ch. 23, sect. 7. 

Massachusetts is parental in her government. More and 
more, as year after year rolls by, she seeks to substitute pre- 
vention for remedy, and rewards for penalties. She strives to 
make industry the antidote to poverty, and to counterwork the 
progress of vice and crime by the diffusion of knowledge and 
the culture of virtuous principles. She seeks not only to miti- 
gate those great physical and mental calamities of which man- 
kind are the sad inheritors, but also to avert those infinitely 
greater moral calamities w-hich form the disastrous heritage of 
depraved passions. Hence it has long been her policy to endow 
or to aid asylums for the cure of disease. She succors and 
maintains all the poor within her borders, whatever may have 
been the land of their nativity. She founds and supports hos- 
pitals for restoring reason to the insane ; and even for those 

193 



i8 

violators of the law whom she is obliged to sequestrate from 
society she provides daily instruction and the ministrations of 
the gospel at the public charge. To those who, in the order 
of Nature and Providence, have been bereft of the noble facul- 
ties of hearing and of speech, she teaches a new language, and 
opens their imprisoned minds and hearts to conversation with 
men and to communion with God ; and it hardly transcends the 
literal truth to say that she gives sight to the blind. For the 
remnants of those aboriginal tribes, who for so many ages 
roamed over this land without cultivating its soil or elevating 
themselves in the scale of being, her annual bounty provides 
good schools ; and, when the equal, natural, and constitutional 
rights of the outcast children of Africa were thought to be in- 
vaded, she armed her courts of judicature with power to pun- 
ish the aggressors. The public highway is not more open and 
free for every man in the community than is the public school- 
house for every child ; and each parent feels that a free edu- 
cation is as secure a part of the birthright of his offspring as 
Heaven's bounties of light and air. The State not only com- 
mands that the means of education shall be provided for all, 
but she denounces penalties against all individuals, and all 
towns and cities, however populous or powerful they may be, 
that shall presume to stand between her bounty and its recipi- 
ents. In her righteous code the interception of knowledge is 
a crime ; and, if parents are unable to supply their children 
with books, she becomes a parent, and supplies them. . . . 

Public sentiment exceeds and excels the law. Annually vast 
sums are given for eleemosynary and charitable purposes, — to 
promote the cause of temperance, to send the gospel to the 
heathen, and to diffuse the doctrines of peace, which are the 
doctrines of the Prince of Peace. 

For public, free education alone, including the direct outlay 
of money and the interest on capital invested, Massachusetts 
expends annually more than a million of dollars. To support 
religious institutions for the worship of God and the salvation 
of men she annually expends more than another million, and 
what she gives away in the various forms of charity far ex- 
ceeds a third sum of equal magnitude. She explores the world 
for new objects of beneficence; and, so deep and common is 
the feeling which expects and prompts all this that she is grad- 
ually changing and ennobling the definition of a cardinal word 
in the language of morals, — doing what no king or court with 
194 



19 

all their authority, nor royal academy with all its sages and 
literary men, can do : she is changing the meaning of charity 
into duty. 

For the support of the poor, nine-tenths of whose cost origi- 
nate with foreigners or come from one prolific vice, whose last 
convulsive energies she is now struggling to subdue, she annu- 
ally pays more than three hundred thousand dollars ; for the 
support and improvement of public highways, she pays a much 
larger sum ; and, within the last dozen or fourteen years, she 
has invested a capital in railroads, within and without the State, 
of nearly or quite sixty millions of dollars. 

Whence comes her means to give with each returning year 
more than a million of dollars to public education, more than 
another million to religion, and more than a third to amelio- 
rate and succor the afflicted and the. ignorant at home, and to 
bless, in distant lands, those who sit in the region and shadow 
of death ? How does she support her poor, maintain her public 
ways, and contribute such vast sums for purposes of internal 
improvement, besides maintaining her immense commercial 
transactions with every zone in the world ? 

Has she a vast domain ? Her whole territory would not 
make a court-yard of respectable dimensions to stand in front 
of many of the states and territories belonging to the Union. 
Does she draw revenues from conquered provinces or subju- 
gated realms ? She conquers nothing, she subdues nothing, 
save the great elemental forces of Nature, which God gives 
freely, whenever and wherever they are asked for in the lan- 
guage of genius and science, and in regard to which no profu- 
sion or prodigality to one can diminish the bounty always ready 
for others. 

Does she live by the toil of a race of serfs and vassals w T hom 
she holds in personal and hereditary bondage? — by one com- 
prehensive and sovereign act of violence seizing upon both 
body and soul at once, and superseding the thousand acts of 
plunder which make up the life of a common robber ? Every 
man who treads her sacred soil is free ; all are free alike ; and 
within her borders, for any purpose connected with human 
slavery, iron will not be welded into a fetter. 

Has she rich mines of the precious metals ? In all her cof- 
fers there is not a drachm of silver or of gold which has not 
been obtained by the sweat of her brow' or the vigor of her 
brain. 

i95 



20 

Has she magazines of mineral wealth imbedded in the 
earth ? or are her soil and climate so spontaneously exuberant 
that she reaps luxuriant harvests from uncultivated fields ? 
Alas ! the orator has barbed his satire by declaring her only 
natural productions to be granite and ice. 

Whence, then, I again ask, comes her wealth ? I do not 
mean the gorgeous wealth which is displayed in the voluptuous 
and too often enervating residences of the affluent, but that 
golden mean of property — such as Agur asked for in his per- 
fect prayer — which carries blessings in its train to thousands 
of householders, which spreads solid comfort and competence 
through the dwellings of the land, which furnishes the means 
of instruction, of social pleasures and refinement to the citizens 
at large, which saves from the cruel sufferings and the more 
cruel temptations of penury. The families scattered over her 
hills and along her valleys have not merely a shelter from the 
inclemencies of the seasons, but the sanctuary of a home. Not 
only food, but books, are spread upon their tables. Her com- 
monest houses have the means of hospitality. They have appli- 
ances for sickness, and resources laid up against accident and 
the infirmities of age. Whether in her rural districts or her 
populous towns, a wandering, native-born beggar is a prodigy ; 
and the twelve millions of dollars deposited in her savings in- 
stitutions do not more loudly proclaim the frugality and provi- 
dence of the past than they foretell the competence and enjoy- 
ments of the future. 

One copious, exhaustless fountain supplies all this abun- 
dance. It is education, — the intellectual, moral, and religious 
education of the people. Having no other mines to work, 
Massachusetts has mined into the human intellect ; and, from 
its limitless resources, she has won more sustaining and endur- 
ing prosperity and happiness than if she had been founded on 
a stratification of silver and gold, reaching deeper down than 
geology has yet penetrated. From her high religious convic- 
tions she has learned that great lesson, — to set a value upon 
time. Regarding the faculties as the gift of God, she has felt 
bound both to use and to improve them. Mingling skill, and 
intelligence with the daily occupations of life, she has made 
labor honorable ; and, as a necessary consequence, idleness is 
disgraceful. Knowledge has been the ambition of her sons, 
and she has reverenced and venerated the purity and chastity 
of her matrons and her daughters. At the hearthstone, at the 
196 



21 

family table, and at the family altar, — on all those occasions 
where the structure of the youthful character is builded up, — 
these sentiments of love for knowledge, and of reverence for 
maidenly virtue, have been builded in; and there they stand, so 
wrought and mingled with the fibres of being that none but 
God can tell which is Nature and which is education, which 
we owe primarily to the grace of Heaven and which to the 
co-operating wisdom of the institutions of men. . . . He who 
studies the present or the historic character of Massachusetts 
will see (and he who studies it most profoundly will see 
most clearly) that whatever of abundance, of intelligence, 
or of integrity, whatever of character at home or of renown 
abroad, she may possess, all has been evolved from the en- 
lightened and, at least, partially Christianized mind, not of a 
few, but of the great masses, of her people. They are not the 
result of outward riches or art brought around it or laminated 
over it, but of an awakened inward force, working energetically 
outwards, and fashioning the most intractable circumstances to 
the dominion of its own desires and resolves ; and this force 
has been awakened and its unspent energies replenished, more 
than from all things else, by her common schools. 

When we witness the mighty achievements of art, — the loco- 
motive, taking up its burden of a hundred tons, and transport- 
ing it for hundreds of miles between the rising and the setting 
sun ; the steamboat, cleaving its rapid way, triumphant over 
wind and tide; the power-loom, yielding products of greater 
richness and abundance in a single day than all the inhabitants 
of Tyre could have manufactured in years ; the printing-press, 
which could have replaced the Alexandrian Library within a 
week after it was burnt ; the lightning, not only domesticated 
in the laboratories of the useful arts, but employed as a messen- 
ger between distant cities ; and galleries of beautiful paintings, 
quickened into life by the sunbeams, — when we see all these 
marvels of power and of celerity, we are prone to conclude that 
it is to them we are indebted for the increase of our wealth and 
for the progress of our society. But were there any statistics 
to show the aggregate value of all the thrifty and gainful habits 
of the people at large, the greater productiveness of the edu- 
cated than of the brutified laborer, the increased power of the 
intelligent hand, and the broad survey and deep intuition of 
the intelligent eye ; could we see a ledger account of the profits 
which come from forethought, order, and system as they preside 

J 97 



22 

over all our farms, in all our workshops, and emphatically in all 
the labors of our households, — we should then know how rap- 
idly their gathered units swell into millions upon millions. The 
skill that strikes the nail's head instead of the fingers' ends, 
the care that mends a fence and saves a cornfield, that drives a 
horseshoe nail and secures both rider and horse, that extin- 
guishes a light and saves a house, the prudence that cuts the 
coat according to the cloth, that lays by something for a rainy 
day and that postpones marriage until reasonably sure of a 
livelihood, the forethought that sees the end from the begin- 
ning, and reaches it by the direct route of an hour instead of 
the circuitous gropings of a day, the exact remembrance im- 
pressed upon childhood to do the errand as it was bidden, and, 
more than all, the economy of virtue over vice, of restrained 
over pampered desires, — these things are not set down in the 
works on political economy ; but they have far more to do with 
the wealth of nations than any laws which aim to regulate the 
balance of trade, or any speculations on capital and labor, or 
any of the great achievements of art. That vast variety of 
ways in which an intelligent people surpass a stupid one, and 
an exemplary people an immoral one, has infinitely more to do 
with the well-being of a nation than soil or climate, or even 
than government itself, excepting so far as government may 
prove to be the patron of intelligence and virtue. 

From her earliest colonial history the policy of Massachu- 
setts has been to develop the minds of all her people, and to 
imbue them with the principles of duty. To do this work most 
effectually, she has begun it with the young. If she would 
continue to mount higher and higher toward the summit of 
prosperity, she must continue the means by which her present 
elevation has been gained. In doing this, she will not only 
exercise the noblest prerogative of government, but will co- 
operate with the Almighty in one of his sublimest works. 



Horace Mann's greatest services to education must be sought in 
the field of institutions, organization, administration, legislation,' and 
public opinion. He was a great constructive pedagogist, a wise 
educational statesman, an eloquent tribune of the common school. 
He called upon the people of all classes, as with the voice of a 
herald, to raise their estimate of public instruction, and to provide 
better facilities by which it could be furnished. He devised or 
198 



23 

adopted new educational agencies, and persuaded the people to use 
them. He organized public opinion, and influenced the action of 
legislatures. He gave men higher ideas of the work and character 
of the teacher at the same time that he taught the teacher to mag- 
nify his office. He heightened the popular estimate of the instru- 
ments that are conducive and necessary to the existence of good 
schools. He elevated men's ideas of the value of ethical training, 
and made valuable suggestions looking to its prosecution. But his 
great theme was the relation of intellectual and moral knowledge to 
human well-being, individual and social. Here his faith never 
faltered, his ardor never cooled. In no other name did he trust for 
the safety of society. A confirmed rationalist, he looked with 
supreme confidence to the healing power of popular intelligence and 
virtue. In his successive reports and addresses he set forth his 
faith, and the grounds of it, with wonderful force of statement and 
fertility of illustration. To him the old theme was ever new and 
ever fascinating. He poured into the body politic a large measure 
of his own lofty faith, his great unselfishness, his burning enthusi- 
asm. He believed in the democratizing movement of modern times, 
and preached the perfectibility of man. It was in this way that, as 
Mr. Parker said, he took up the common schools of Massachusetts 
in his arms and blessed them. No doubt he committed the mistake 
that rationalists are always prone to commit, — that of overesti- 
mating the power of intelligence as a means to virtue. Still, it is 
perfectly obvious that a generous measure of such confidence is a 
prerequisite to the efficiency and even to the existence of public 
schools, and that it forms the very foundation of democratic govern- 
ment. — Hinsdale. 



Horace Mann was the great leader in the Common School Revival in 
New England in the middle of the present century. The Massachusetts 
State Board of Education was created in 1837, through the efforts of 
James G. Carter and others ; and Mann became its first secretary, 
holding the position until 1848. His influence upon educational thought 
and sentiment, not only in Massachusetts, but throughout the country, was 
unparalleled. To him more, perhaps, than to any other, our common-school 
system is indebted for its remarkable development during the last half of 
the century. His twelve annual reports, each devoted to distinct subjects, 
are classics in our educational literature. The tenth report, that of 1846, 
is given in the present leaflet, almost in its entirety. A brief outline of the 
twelve reports may be found in Hinsdale's little volume upon Mann, 
chap, vii; also in Dr. William T. Harris's address at the Mann Cen- 
tennial, printed in the Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1895-96, 
vol. i. All of these reports are printed in full in the Life and Works 
of Horace Mann, 5 vols.; and here also (vol. ii.) may be found the 
seven lectures delivered by Mann in successive- years before the various 
county conventions of the State. The third and fifth of these lectures, 
" The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government " and " An 

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Historical View of Education, showing its Dii 022 117 462 8 

are especially commended to the student as re-eniorcing me considerations 
urged in the report reprinted in the present leaflet. 

A thorough life of Horace Mann, by Mrs. Mann, occupies the first of 
the five volumes of the Life and Works ; and there is an admirable brief 
biography by Prof. B. A. Hinsdale in the " Great Educators " series, which 
contains, in an appendix, an excellent bibliography. The survey of the 
period, in this little volume, is most discriminating ; and Dr. Hinsdale per- 
forms a distinct service in directing attention so intelligently and justly to 
Mann's forerunners, and especially to James G. Carter, "the one man 
who did more to cast up a highway for Horace Mann than any other." 
"To him," says Henry Barnard, "more than to any other one person be- 
longs the credit of having first attracted the attention of the leading minds 
of Massachusetts to the necessity of immediate and thorough improve- 
ment in the system of free or public schools." George B. Emerson rightly 
bestowed upon him the title of " Father of Normal Schools " ; and Dr. 
Hinsdale pronounces his Letters on the Free Schools of New England 
" incomparably the best existing mirror of education in New England in 
the first quarter of this century." This, and his Essays upon Popular Edu- 
cation, the closing essay of which outlines the modern Normal School, 
should be read by the student who would understand the situation into 
which Horace Mann entered, and by the general student of the history 
of education in America in the nineteenth century. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE DIRECTORS OF THE OLD SOUTH WORK, 
Old South Meeting-house, Boston, Mass. 



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